from www.allvoices.com – It’s a scurvy situation over at the Pirate Bay and a number of other bittorrent and piracy web sites. Several of the wold’s top intenet piracy sites are currently shut down, and it’s unclear whether the outage is related to a police raid, a denial-of-service attack, or just some buggy technical problems.

The Pirate Bay, one of the most popular file-sharing and illegal downloading sites in the world, did not actually get raided. Police raided the Pirate Bay’s former server host, a Swedish company called PRQ that hosts numerous piracy sites, the controversial WikiLeaks, and some child pornography sites whose names I’m afraid to even type lest I end up on some FBI watch-list.

Forbes magazine has confirmed that the Pirate Bay’s web host was raided by Swedish police Monday, and several of their servers were seized. The PRQ web hosting company was founded by the same two people who founded the Pirate Bay, though Pirate Bay claims they are no longer hosted on PRQ. Pirate Bay also claims they are currently down because of a “power failure” that is unrelated to the raid.

“We have a relay (at PRQ) but not that much more,” the Pirate Bay said in a statement on their Facebook page. “This combined with a power failure at another place is the reason why we’re down at the moment. The raid mentioned below is not aimed at us.”

The Pirate Bay is still not back online, as of this writing. Their Facebook page has a status posted Tuesday afternoon claiming, “Looks like we won’t be up until tomorrow.” TorrentFreak reports that numerous torrent sites and sports streaming sites were also shut down, and they’re updating that report constantly with which sites are back up.

One would figure that the police raided PRQ for copyright violations, but you could pretty much pick any reason to raid that company. They not only host dozens of piracy sites, but also the secret-document leak site WikiLeaks, and numerous child porn and pedpohile advocacy sites. “Even though I loathe what (these web sites) say, I defend them,” PRQ owner Mikael Viborg told Forbes. PRQ is a no-questions-asked host that allows their often-shady clients to remain anonymous.

Speaking of anonymous, the hacker collective Anonymous vows to take revenge on the Swedish government for the raid. A YouTube video attributed to Anonymous was posted Monday, claiming, “The raid on PRQ disabled many of our torrent sites. We see this as a crime against freedom to information and there for (sic) we have disabled some of swedish governments or affiliate sites in protest against this raid.”

None of the sites Anonymous threatened have yet been affected. The Pirate Bay, however, currently remains down.